Quotes

i. “Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.” (Rebecca West)

ii. “There is no means of proving it is preferable to be than not to be.” (Emil Cioran)

iii. “The obsession with suicide is characteristic of the man who can neither live nor die, and whose attention never swerves from this double impossibility.” (-ll-)

iv. “Once upon a time leftists and radicals talked of liberation or the abolition of work. Now the talk is about full employment.” (Russell Jacoby)

v. “Among artists without talent Marxism will always be popular, since it enables them to blame society for the fact that nobody wants to hear what they have to say.” (Clive James)

vi. “the moment when a historian says that something had to happen is the moment when he stops writing history and starts predicting the past.” (-ll-)

vii. “The answer to the nagging conundrum of how a civilized country like Germany could produce the Holocaust is that Germany ceased to be civilized from the moment Hitler came to power.” (-ll-)

viii. “One of the most obvious facts about grown-ups to a child is that they have forgotten what it is like to be a child.” (Randall Jarrell)

ix. “…in this world, often, there is nothing to praise but no one to blame…” (-ll-)

x. “The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks.” (-ll-)

xi. “Even to-day, […] there are few men who doubt that motorcars will in five years’ time be more comfortable and cheaper than to-day. They believe in this as they believe that the sun will rise in the morning. The metaphor is an exact one. For, in fact, the common man, finding himself in a world so excellent, technically and socially, believes that it has been produced by nature, and never thinks of the personal efforts of highly-endowed individuals which the creation of this new world presupposed. Still less will he admit the notion that all these facilities still require the support of certain difficult human virtues, the least failure of which would cause the rapid disappearance of the whole magnificent edifice.” (José Ortega y Gasset)

xii. “Even in the most insignificant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is identical for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is created by the thoughts of other people.” (Marcel Proust)

xiii. “We are not provided with wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness which no one else can take for us, an effort which no one can spare us.” (-ll-)

xiv. “Central to the paradigm that the mind is modulated by hormones is the recognition that the stuff of thought is not caged in the brain but is scattered all over the body; regulatory hormones are ubiquitous. (Richard Bergland)

xv. “There is a relation between persons and role. But the relationship answers to the interactive system—to the frame—in which the role is performed and the self of the performer is glimpsed. Self, then, is not an entity half-concealed behind events, but a changeable formula for managing oneself during them. Just as the current situation prescribes the official guise behind which we will conceal ourselves, so it provides where and how we will show through, the culture itself prescribing what sort of entity we must believe ourselves to be in order to have something to show through in this manner.” (Erving Goffman)

xvi. “The happiness of most people we know is not ruined by great catastrophes or fatal errors, but by the repetition of slowly destructive little things.” (Ernest Dimnet)

xvii. “The admonitions of those who seldom remonstrate are more effective than the commands of naggers.” (Ruth Rendell, A judgement in stone)

xviii. “Like all true eccentrics, he thought other people very odd.” (-ll-)

xix. “selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.” (-ll-)

xx. “It takes many good deeds to build a good reputation, and only one bad one to lose it.” (Benjamin Franklin)

About me/this blog

This blog is mainly a site where I keep track of and share some of the stuff I read and learn. Only a small subset of the posts on this blog deal with economics – I have diverse interests, and as the category cloud in the sidebar below illustrates this blog contains posts about all kinds of stuff: Mathematics, physics, statistics, geology, geography, health care and medicine, psychology, evolutionary biology, genetics, history, anthropology, archaeology, chess, …

You’re always welcome to ask questions in the comment section. New readers should be aware that the first comment someone leaves on this blog is always withheld automatically to limit spam and needs to be approved by me before it appears on the site; so your first question or comment may not appear immediately.

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Goodreads Quotes

"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)